SMS Niobe was the second member of the ten-ship Gazelle class of light cruisers that were built for the German Kaiserliche Marine in the late 1890s and early 1900s. Built to be able to serve with the main German fleet and as a colonial cruiser, she was armed with a battery of ten 10. 5 cm guns and a top speed of 21. 5 knots. The ship had a long career, serving in all three German navies, along with the Yugoslav and Italian fleets over the span of more than forty years.
About SMS Niobe in brief
SMS Niobe was the second member of the ten-ship Gazelle class of light cruisers that were built for the German Kaiserliche Marine in the late 1890s and early 1900s. Built to be able to serve with the main German fleet and as a colonial cruiser, she was armed with a battery of ten 10. 5 cm guns and a top speed of 21. 5 knots. The ship had a long career, serving in all three German navies, along with the Yugoslav and Italian fleets over the span of more than forty years. In 1925, Germany sold the ship to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, where she was renamed Dalmacija. She was captured by the Italians during the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941 and served in the Italian Regia Marina until the Italian surrender in September 1943. In December 1943, she ran aground on the island of Silba, and was subsequently destroyed by British Motor Torpedo Boats. The wreck was ultimately salvaged and broken up for scrap between 1947 and 1952. The Gazelle design provided the basis for all of the light cruising ships built by the German fleet to the last official designs prepared in 1914. The second member, Niobe, introduced the use of water-tube boilers, which significantly increased the power of the ship’s propulsion system and thus top speed. The designers had to design a small cruiser with armor protection that had an optimal combination of speed, armament, and stability necessary for fleet operations.
She also had the endurance to operate on foreign stations in the German colonial empire. Named after a Greek figure from mythology, the ship was ordered under the contract to be built in 1898 and was laid down at the AG Weser yard in Bremen on 30 August 1898 and launched after fitting-out work commenced on July 18, 1899. Her propulsion system consisted of two four-cylinder triple-expansion steam engines manufactured by AG Germania in Tegel. She displaced 2,643 t normally and up to 2,963 t at full combat load. She carried 500 t of coal, which gave her a range of 3,570 nautical miles at 10 knots. She had a crew of 14 officers and 243 enlisted men and was equipped with two 45 cm torpedo tubes with five torpedoes submerged in the broad hull on the broadside. The guns could engage targets out to 12,200 m and were supplied with 1,200 rounds of ammunition, for 100 shells per shell. They were protected by an armored deck that was 20mm thick, with the conning tower had 80mm thick and the gun shields were 50mm thick. The ship was disarmed in 1917, but as one of the cruisers permitted to the postwar Reichsmarine by the Treaty of Versailles, it was modernized and rearmed in the early 1920s. It was used in the Adriatic Sea briefly until the German occupiers of Italy, who restored her original name.
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This page is based on the article SMS Niobe published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 08, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
